Backyard Birds: Watercolors for Beginners and Beyond

1. Intro: Backyard Birds in Watercolors: Hello, and welcome to my home studio. I'm Emily, and in today's Skillshare class, our goal is to relax and have fun while painting with watercolors. This Skillshare tutorial is designed for all skill levels and comes with three different bird projects, a Baltimore Oriole, an Indigo Bunting, and a Cedar Waxwing. These three designs focus on mastering an initial wet-on-wet layer and then adding shadows with a second wet-on-dry layer. Glass includes printable templates for printing the outlines directly onto your watercolor cards, using your home printer and traceable templates if you'd rather trace the outline onto your paper. I've also included a video tutorial to teach you how to print onto your watercolor paper using your home printer. In this step by step video tutorial, you'll learn how to create these paintings using basic watercolor techniques like wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry. You'll practice your fine brush control and techniques to paint birds without having to paint individual feathers. So get your paints, paper, and brushes ready, and let's get started painting some backyard birds using watercolors. 2. Supplies: Alright, so let's start out by talking about the supplies that you'll need for this tutorial. First off, you will notice that for all Three of the tutorials, I will be using paint that's on the bottom of a single paper, these paint dots that look like this. It's because these tutorials were originally created for watercolor kits that I sell on my website. If you're looking to have the template already printed out and a brush and your colors, you can go on my website. You can order the kit for the tutorials. Otherwise, you can use the supplies that you have at home. So we'll start with paper choice. So for paper, I am using arches, cold pressed, 140 pound paper. This comes in blocks of paper. You can use blocks or you can use you can use pads. I am using the pad of paper so that I can cut them into eight by ten pieces. These eight by ten pieces, then I can either pass through my home printer and print on more or less waterproof ink, or I can hold it up to my window and use my window as a light box to trace the template onto my paper. Now, you notice that in my tutorials, I am not taping my paper onto a flat surface. That's because we're not wetting the entire sheet of paper. Your paper might bend and warp just slightly if you don't tape it down. If you do want to tape it down, though, you're more than welcome to tape down. I usually use these plastic corrugated boards. I buy these from Michael's. They're large poster boards that I cut into sizes, different sizes. The tape that I like to use for watercolors is either a green frog tape. It's like a painter's tape, but it's called frog tape. Or I've also found a different type. It's an Australian brand called kiwi Hub, and this tape is made specifically for watercolors. You will also need a cup of water. A paper towel or a rag, and then you'll need some paint brushes. So for the tutorial, I'm using the round size two brush that was included in everyone's kits. However, at my home studio, I like to use silver limited black velvet brushes. These are round brushes, size four or size six. I usually use the size four for project details like these bird tutorials. You can also find a slightly smaller brush for some details, either size zero or size one if you need a smaller brush for the eyes. And then before we talk about our paints, I do want to mention that in parts of the tutorial, there is an optional place to use a white gel pen. I'm using Nibal Cigna white gel pen, and this is just in case you don't if you're not able to keep the white of the paper for the highlights of the eyes open and clean, I like using these white gel pens to add a highlight after my paper has dried. Alright, so let's then go on and talk about paint choice. Like I said, on my home studio, I like to paint from a palette that looks like this. But in all the tutorials, you'll notice that I will be painting from paint dots on my practice sheet. Alright, so for my watercolor paints, I am using Windsor Newton Cotman brand. So Cotman is their student grade brand for watercolor paints. You'll notice in the tutorial, I'm using a yellow called gamboge, cadmium deep red, dioxyine purple, palo blue, hookers green dark, pains gray, and cadmium orange hue. Uh, now, of course, you are more than welcome to use whatever colors you have at home. It doesn't have to be Windsor and Newton. I also really enjoy using Daniel Smith. And so whatever colors are similar to the colors in these tutorials, feel free to use. 3. How to Print and Use your Templates: In this video, we'll look at how to print templates, trace using those templates, and trace using your phone. I'm going to talk quickly about printers. Not all printers are designed equally when it comes to printing on your watercolor paper. The first printer I want to talk about is the Epson Workforce WF 78 40. I just purchased this printer, and I am in love with it. It's an ink jet printer. It uses pigment ink, which is known to be waterproof. So when you're looking at your printer, pigment ink is better than die ink. The ink that this printer uses is called Durabrte ultra ink. That means that when it's printed and you use your watercolors on top of it, that ink will not bleed. It does have a rear feed, which is definitely useful. You will need to use rear feed when you are printing on watercolor paper. However, you do need to load it one by one, which can be tedious, and it is a very large machine. Next, we're going to compare that with a brother laser printer. With laser printers, a lot of people will tend to use a laser printer instead of an ink jet for printing templates on watercolor paper because the ink used is a toner. Toner is waterproof, whereas pigment and dyes can be not so waterproof. You do have a rear feed option, which you will need for card stock watercolor paper. However, some laser printers don't print color very well, so you have to be careful when choosing your laser printer. There's also some concern that the heat used to print using lasers will ruin the sizing of your watercolor paper. Others have used them and think that they're wonderful. I personally don't have any experience with laser printers, but this is just what I've been reading as I've done research. Lastly, we'll talk about the cannon, TS 95 21 C. This is the printer that I'm using in this video tutorial. It's the first printer that I started printing on. I have been printing both prints, cards, merchandise, as well as some templates. This is also an ink jet printer, which can cause some concern because the die used in this printer is a die ink. Dye inks tend to be not waterproof and will bleed slightly versus the pigment ink used in my Epsin printer. After I noticed how much bleeding of ink this was causing on my watercolor paper, that's when I decided to purchase the Epsin workforce. The cannon printer does have a rear feed option, which is necessary when printing on cardstock or watercolor paper. However, you do still need to load it one by one, or otherwise it will jam and cause a complete mess. As you get ready to print on your watercolor paper, using your home printer, just be aware of these differences knowing that the template that you print might be waterproof or it might not be waterproof. I might bleed slightly. If this is a concern for you and it ends up being troublesome, remember that there are templates for tracing in this tutorial as well, and it might benefit you to trace the template instead of print it directly on your watercolor paper. Let's take a look at how to print using Mcanon Ts 95 21 C. If your project is meant to be printed on an eight by ten inch of paper, you will need to cut it first. I do recommend using a cold press paper of at least 140 pounds. Once your paper is cut, you'll once again scroll down to the printable template section of your PDF. Continue scrolling until you find the eight by ten inch design that you'd like to print. For example, this Pony, go find the printer icon and click once again, you'll want to check to make sure that you have your printer selected. We do not want to print all of the PDF. We just want the current paper. Make sure that the current view is the design you want to print. Right now, we need to choose a different size. Currently, it's on a seven by ten inch size of paper. So we're going to click on page setup. Then paper size. And you'll notice that there is no eight by ten option, so we are going to have to manage custom sizes. Once again, we need to create our own custom size, clicking Plus Bot button, and we'll rename it eight by 10 ". Change the width to eight the height to ten. And once again, we don't want any margins. We're going to change every margin to zero. Then click Okay. Check the paper size once again to make sure it's the correct size. Eight by ten, then click Okay. Now, it might be the setting on fit. We do not want it to be on fit. Remember, we want it to be printed on the button to the right that says actual size. So I'm going to click on actual size. You should see, once again, the red box around the area that will be printed. Check again that you have an eight by ten inch piece of paper. Make sure that it's on the correct portrait versus landscape. If it's landscape, it will not fit within the red box. And then click Print. Once again, you'll load your pre cut paper in the rear tray of your printer. Make sure that the rough side is facing up. These designs are meant to be printed on, so you'll notice the lines are a little bit lighter. You're all set to paint. If you don't feel comfortable printing out the template directly on your watercolor paper, there are also darker templates that you can download to use to trace the template onto your watercolor paper. As soon as you open up the PDF, you'll need to scroll down past the printable templates to the traceable template section. You can use the following templates to print each design onto regular 8.5 by 11 inch paper, and then trace it onto your watercolor paper. You'll note that these traceable templates have darker outlines. Scroll down to the template that you'd like to print. If you're printing a watercolor card, you'll notice that it has a box around it. Click on the print icon. We will not print all. We'll click on the current selection only. You'll check the paper size. Right now, it's on eight by 10 ", so I need to go down to my page setup. Find paper size and click on US Letter. Click Okay. And now, it doesn't matter if we have fit or actual size. Either one will not change the size of your printout. It will be the same size. Once again, make sure that you're printing to an 8.5 by 11 inch piece of paper, and then click Print. Since you're using regular plain paper, you can either load it in the rear tray or you can load it in the lower tray. You'll notice that your template comes out nice and dark. To use your tracing template, first, place your watercolor paper on top of your dark template. You'll need to line it up correctly. Then use some masking tape or painter's tape to secure your watercolor paper on top of your template. Use either a light box or a bright window to trace the template onto your watercolor paper. Last option is to use your phone to trace the templates onto your watercolor paper. I like to use an app on my phone called DaVinci Eye. It's a one time purchase where you can upload any picture or image that you'd like to trace. Using the classic mode, you can move and resize your image to help you draw it onto your watercolor paper. To use this technique, you will need a phone holder so you can look through your phone as you're tracing your outline. Please do remember that these templates are for personal use only. It is illegal to paint them and then sell them for money. Enjoy painting them for yourselves or to give them as a gift. Thank you. If you are interested in these designs printed on your watercolor paper, but don't have a printer at home, you can always purchase one of my watercolor kits on my website. Paper, paints, and a brush are included in the purchase of your kit. 4. Baltimore Oriole Part 1: Alright, so our first step in painting our Baltimore Oriole is we're going to want to paint the colorful body first. We need to let this section of that bright orange dry before we can paint the black on top. So we're going to use a technique called wet-on-wet. You practice this on your practice sheet. And what we'll do is we'll drop in some paint using water the section that we want to add that orange color too. Now, we're only going to add water to this section where we want that orange to travel because the black is just so deep and dark of a black, I don't want to lighten up that black by adding a layer of orange underneath my black. So I'm going to try to keep my water only to where that orange is going. I'm going to constantly be grabbing more liquid. I want to make sure that this section really is nice and wet. So I'm kind of grabbing a puddle of water, and then I'm going to push that puddle to the edge of my bird's body. Now, when I come down to the tail, I'm only going to paint the section of the tail that has orange on it, so it's this lower section of the tail. And then before I grab my pigment and drop in my paint, I want to go back to that first section, kind of re wet that first section. I'm gonna tilt my head to the side and take a peek at that section that I wetted to make sure that I see a really nice and bright reflection. If I can see this nice shine on the wet space, it means that it's wet enough. If any section of this wetted area is starting to become a little bit more matt, that means that your section is drying and you'll need to rewet it. So I'm going to start with this cadmium orange hue, since the majority of the body, it has this base of orange, and then I'm going to drop in lows and some reds from that orange. So I'm going to start by dropping in my orange closest to the belly here. I want the most amount of orange here on the belly. And then as I drop it in, you'll notice very quickly if you have enough water on your bird's body. You should be able to really easily mix this color in with the water. If you're not able to, add some water right now. You want to make sure you have enough time to mix all three of your colors. So I'm going to take this orange, and then I'm going to bring this orange all the way up to the edge of the body. If I leave any of that clean water at the edge, you're going to end up noticing that there's going to be a clean line of water. And I want the pigment all the way up to the edge. I'm going to bring this orange all the way down to the tail. Once again. If I accidentally go over any of the wing here, I can take my paper towel, press down really hard. And then I do need to add water to that section because by pressing down, I do dry out that section. I can already tell that my tail here is getting dry, so I'm going to re add some water. Now, the section here, kind of above the wings, I'm going to use whatever orange is on my brush because this section is a lot lighter than the body of my Oriole. So I don't need to add more orange here. I'm just going to kind of use whatever's left on my brush, and I'm gonna drag it into that area. Now, before this dries, I do want to drop in some highlights, and I do want to drop in some darker shades. So I'm gonna clean my brush. I'm going to start with my highlights with my yellow. So grab a little bit of yellow. I want more of this yellow on these two little sections on the shoulder here. It is a little bit brighter of yellow orange than the darker orange from the whole body. I may also grab a little bit of that yellow, bring it kind of on this underside of the wing. The darkest of these oranges is going to be concentrated along the breast of our Oriole. Now, I'm doing this quickly because I don't want this layer to dry. And so now I'm gonna switch to my cadmium red. And I want to mix in some of that red with my orange. So I'll grab that org that red, and I'll kind of start to mix it. Seems like I had some purple on top of that red. I'm going to start to mix it along the belly here of my Oriole. And if it gets a little bit too dark of a color, we can always add in a little bit more orange there, as well. And I'll just grab some of that red orange and I'll pull some of that red orange down. I do want to leave some of that brighter orange to shine through, so I don't want it to be completely mixed. Grab a little bit more of that orange hue. And then if there are any sections where it blended a little bit too much for my liking, I can go back and I can use a dry brush to soak up and stip up any of these sections that got a little bit too dark from my red. Now, this first layer is gonna be simply trying to get my a few of these shades here. So I don't need to add all of the orangy shades and the darkest shades that I see, but I just kind of want a template for myself as to where some of these colors are going. After we let it dry, then we can go in and we can add some extra an extra layer of colors. Alright, so I'm pretty happy with how that's looking, so I'm gonna let that section dry. And as I let that section dry, I'm gonna move on and start working on my greenery and my oranges around my Oriole. 5. Baltimore Oriole Part 2: Alright, so I'm gonna continue with this theme of what on W, and I'm gonna be painting my oranges all around my Baltimore Oriole. So for those of you who do know a little bit about birds, you'll know that particularly the Baltimore Oriole is really attracted to fresh oranges. So you might see a lot of people leaving orange halves on their porches to attract these Baltimore Orioles. And because of their really beautiful orange coloring, I thought it would be fun to add some oranges. So we're going to be doing the same exact technique that we did on the chest at the Baltimore Oriole, so you'll be able to continue to practice this and we'll wet our area first of our orange. And now that our whole orange is wet, now we can drop in our colors. So I'm going to keep this whole concept of keeping a high light in a certain spot of my orange and then keeping low lights as well. So here I'm laying down my first coat of color, and this is going to be my medium tone. So I can lift some color from this to make highlights. I can also drop in some darker color to add shadows. Now, before I do this, I want to make sure that I have a light source figured out. So I'm going to pretend that my light source is coming from this upper right hand side. So all my oranges are going to have highlights on this upper right side and low lights and shadows on the lower left. So when I add a little bit of a highlight or with some yellow, I might add a little bit of highlight on this right side. And then I might add a little bit more of this orange to this lower left side. Now, you may notice that because of this round shape of my orange, I'm still gonna leave a little sliver at the very lower edge of my orange, and that's going to stay this lighter orange color. I'm not gonna wet my brush. I'm gonna go directly from a wet brush to grabbing some red just from the tip. Now, I'm not mixing that red with water because I want that red to stay put in the center of the orange. I don't want this red to blend too much. If I add too much water, to my brush, when I grab the red, then that water is gonna push all the other pigment away. So I keep very little water on my brush, just whatever's on it, and then I can add my red and my oranges, my more concentrated colors along this center C. Before we move on to our next orange, we can wash our brush, dry it. And then we can use a dry brush to lift any areas that got a little too dark. So I can go back to where this highlight might be and use a dry brush to lift some of that paint from that section of my orange. Now, you could go in and you could press down with your paper towel, but because these are so small, it's a little harder to control your paper towel. It's a lot easier to control your lifting using a dry brush. And we'll continue doing that same step three more times. That's That's well, we let our oranges dry. Now let's move on to some of our leaves. So for this step, instead of using wet-on-wet, we're going to mix a color and then use that as our base color, and then we can drop in our darker tone. So my base color is going to be a green. So I'll need some water on my plate. I have a fairly large section of water just because I have quite a few leaves that I'm going to paint. And I'll start by grabbing some of my green dark. And I'll mix that on my plate. I'm gonna need a few brushfls Mm. Alright, now, from here, I actually am going to add a little bit of orange into my green color just because I want to connect the orange from my Baltimore Oriole, and I want to connect the orange from my oranges. And so by adding a little orange into my green, it's going to kind of muddy up that green a little bit, so it'll make it a little bit more of a warm green instead of a cool green. So when we test out this green, it has a few, like, brown tones to it because of adding that orange. So we're going to use this kind of orangy green as our first layer, and then we'll drop in that hooker's green, that green dark directly from our paper. So it's nice and concentrated and dark, and we'll drop it in to our wet leaves. And we'll drop that in to where our leaves are attaching to our branch. Now, remember that some of your oranges are still going to be wet, so you're not going to want to start with these leaves that are touching your oranges. So maybe I'll turn my paper and I'll start with some of these smaller leaves here in the corner. So once again, I'm going to start with a base layer of this green. I always like to start my leaves and touch my leaves first at the center of my leaf where it's the biggest because that's where all of that liquid from my paintbrush is going to let go onto the paper. And so I always want to start in a section that is nice and big. I don't want to start touching my paper at the very tip of my leaf. Alright, now that I have this base layer of color, and I made sure that I had enough liquid on my brush to really get a really nice edge. Now, without washing my brush, I didn't wash it. I'm just gonna grab some of that green directly from my paper. And I'll dot, dot, dot, and drop it in at the base here of my leaf. Because your leaf is wet enough, you're gonna notice that it'll naturally blend. If your base color leaf or if your leaf starts to dry too quickly, when you drop in that dark green, you'll notice that the dark green and the light green, you're going to have a hard edge there. You can soften that edge by drying your brush and then just kind of going back and forth with a dry brush across that hard edge. No, for next time when you paint another leaf, just make sure that that leaf is really nice and wet before you drop in that dark color. So, particularly when you're painting these larger leaves, you'll want to make sure that you go back to the stem or wherever you started. Make sure it's nice and wet before you grab that dark green. And I'll dot, dot, dot, and dot that dark green at the base. 6. Baltimore Oriole Part 3: So once again, I drop in quite a bit of liquid in the center of my leaf. And then I use that liquid, and I have a very light touch on my brush, and I'm using that liquid to pull that liquid to the edge. If I have too much liquid on my brush, I can tap my paper towel, and that'll give me a little bit of a fineer of a point on my brush to paint some of these smaller areas. Without washing my brush, I'll grab some of that dark green. And I'll dot, dot, dot on the dark green at the base of my leaf. Once again, if you don't have enough of a difference between that light and dark, you can wash your brush, dry it, and use a dry brush to lift a little of that lighter green from the very end of your leaf. We are going to paint all of our leaves this way, and we're also going to paint the little bases of these buds here. Now, I know that it can be tricky to get the right amount of liquid to do these really fine little lines here. So start with these little buds. And then when you pull the line here, down the stem, you're using a very, very light touch. And I'm pulling that stem using whatever liquid is left in my brush. I don't want to grab more liquid just to paint a stem. Now, once you get a little faster at this, you are more than welcome to do two leaves at once, where you paint two of your leaves with this lighter green, the first step, the water down, and then you take your dark green and you dot your dark green at the ends of your leaves. So once you've practiced this a few times and you feel confident in doing more than one leaf at a time, just make sure that however many leaves you're doing at once, that that base color, that watered down green stays wet before you drop in your darker green. That's That's That's That's That's that's do That's That's That's That's Alright, so we're going to take a pause from painting our flowers, and we're going to paint the first layer of the black of our feathers. The reason being is that we are going to need this first layer to dry before we can do a second layer. And so we'll need our plate to start. If your green kind of has gone all over the place, you can wipe off your green. We won't need that green anymore. And you'll grab some more water on a new section of your plate. It'll be about the same amount, a similar amount as you had for the green because we are going to need to cover a large amount of our feathers and head of our Baltimore oil. And now, this first layer of our black feathers, we're actually going to start with a water down gray. So we're going to mix, grab some pains gray, grab some pains gray from your plate, from your paper. We're looking to have a medium tone for our Panes gray, so we don't want it to be really, really light and transparent, but we also don't want it to be our blackest of black. So Panes gray is an interesting color, where when you lighten it with water, it's this really nice cool gray. And then if you use it directly from our paper, you have almost a black it can get really, really dark. We want to make sure that we're using a water down color on our first layer because if we make any mistakes and we go over any sections that are supposed to be white, we can press down with our paper towel right away and lift up any mistakes we make. If we go in with a really, really opaque color directly from our paper, then it's going to be a lot more challenging to lift up because it isn't mixed with water. So this is going to help us kind of gain the confidence to go a little bit darker. 7. Baltimore Oriole Part 4: So I'll start with the head area because that's going to be the easiest section to paint. And so I'm going to start painting an even layer. We're not worried about any sort of any sort of feather details. At this point, we just want one even layer. I'm not going to do the beak quite yet. I know the beak is also gray, but I do want to mix in a little more color in this gray. So I'm gonna try my best just to go around the beak for now. If you noticed, just like when we were painting the breast of our bird, I'm really grabbing quite a lot of liquid. And when I grab enough liquid, I can kind of have it puddle and pull, and then I push the pool around. When I do that, I'm left with a really, really nice, even color. If I don't have enough liquid on my paper, that's when you're going to start to see your brush strokes. Now, when I come down to where our color is meeting our gray, I can start to add a few little brush strokes going on top of this color underneath. It might be a little bit hard to see some of this color going on top. So I just want to make sure that I don't have any white shining through. So I might be able to add a few little pull a few little details. So I'm pulling a little bit of that gray into the orange. The same around the neck here, I can pull a little bit of the gray into the orange. And then I'll continue around the backside. Now, you notice that I started in one section and then I'm moving gradually downwards. I'm not jumping from the head to the back of the feathers to the shoulder. The reason I'm staying and pulling this puddle with me is that this is what creates a really nice even wash is when I start in one section, and then I gradually pull it all the way down. Now, I make sure that every detail is is finished before I move on. So I make sure that all of my gray comes all the way to the edges because once this section starts to dry, we lose the ability to work on that section. Here on this little section on the shoulder where we've got some of this dark bleeding in. We're going to paint a solid line along the base of it. And now using whatever liquid is left on my brush, if I don't have that good of a tip, because I have too much liquid, I can take some of that off. I'm going to pull some of that gray into that orange. I'm going to pull these little feathers upward. I'm not going to pull it all too far. I'm just going to pull a few in this kind of upward direction. Just so I leave a little bit of a jagged edge there, and that's going to help it look like feathers. I'm going to do the same thing on this lower side, being careful that this section here is going to be white. So once again, I'll kind of paint that almost line of gray along the base. And then while it's still wet, I'm going to pull some of that gray up using If I have too much liquid on my brush, I can dab my paintbrush. But I'm using whatever liquid is already on the paper instead of grabbing more paint on my brush. Alright. Now, this section here of the wing is going to be a little bit more challenging because there's more sections of the paper that we need to leave white. This strip of wing that is kind of the left wing, where we can just see this little sliver of the left wing in the background. That's going to be all black. There is a little almost P shape of white that we'll try to paint around. And then this whole section here, like I had said, that's gonna stay white. So what we'll do here is we'll add just like we did in these upper sections, we'll add our kind of a line of gray. And then from that line of gray, we'll do the same thing. We'll pull our gray up. Now, this is a technique called negative painting where instead of painting the orange going above the gray, and instead of painting the white going above the gray, we have to pull our colors underneath. And so it paints the negative space underneath these white feathers and underneath the gray or the orange feathers. Mm Alright, now as we move downward on our bird, the largest section of black that you're gonna have is there's going to be this kind of stripe of black in between these two sections of little wing feathers. And so I am going to pull my gray along that line. And now I will be doing that similar pulling little strands. But now I have these little guidelines for me to follow. And so I'm going to pull this gray from the top down I'm using a really light light light touch. And I'm pulling my brush as I'm painting down, I'm pulling my brush up. And what that's doing is that's gonna create a really nice, tiny line, and it'll have a really fine point. But I'm also not gonna worry if I make any sort of mistakes. If I accidentally cover up some of those whites, I'm gonna try my best. But if I accidentally cover any up, I am going to remember that I do have a white j pen, and I have white colored pencils, just in case I need to add some white highlights because I actually covered them. With watercolors, we don't use white on top of our colors. Uh, because our white and watercolors isn't opaque enough. And so we need to try to keep the white of the paper clean, or we need to use a different product, like an acrylic or like a gel pen or colored pencil on top of our watercolors. So as you can see, we've left a little bit of these sections of feathers here without paint. If it's gotten a little bit too white for you, I might do, especially on this top section of white. I just added two little lines of gray towards the base of this white. And I'm going to look at this white section as well because these are also little sections of feathers. So I have whatever's gray, whatever gray is already on my brush, and I might add a few lines, single lines that are mimicking the shape of the curves of this here. Just to kind of show that there's something going on. I'm not trying to paint individual feathers here. I'm just trying to give the essence that, Hey, there is something there. So on the tail feathers, we're gonna use the same technique where we'll drop in our gray. And then as I come up towards the body here, I'm going to pull that gray up into the orange and leave some of these lines going into my orange. And That's good for my tail feathers. Now, I'm not going to blend out any of these hard lines. So I know for some of you who have painted before, you might get the urge to dry your brush and then blend these hard edges. Try to refrain from doing that. Unlike where we have all these soft edges where we did our wet-on-wet. When we paint wet-on-dry paper, our goal is to keep some of these hard edges because that's where you get these details of our feathers looking like feathers. 8. Baltimore Oriole Part 5: Alright, so I'm gonna take this same gray, and I'm gonna paint a layer of gray on the feet. On the feet here, there's a little foot kind of peeking out here. On the feet and on the beak, on my reference photo that I'm painting from, there's a little bit of a purple accent, a little a little tiny purple to the feet and to the beak. And so I'm going to use just a little bit of purple. I'm going to add just a little purple now that the gray is already on my paper. I just want a little purple just to add a little bit of that of that color to my gray. I'm gonna do the same thing for the beak. But I think with the beak, I actually need this gray a little bit lighter. So I'll take some of that gray, and I'll grab some water, and I'll pull some of that gray to kind of to the side there. And this is going to give me a lot less pigment so that I can have a much lighter beak. That's even kind of too dark. So I add some pigment. I'm just going to paint now using water. Because I really do want this beak much lighter than the rest of my bird. And now, from here, there is quite a little bit of purple. So I'm going to grab the tip of my brush with a little purple. And then I notice more purple along the tip of the nose here. I'm going to add that purple, but now I'm gonna wash my brush and dry it off, dab it to dry it a little bit, and then I'll pick up some of that purple if it got to be a little too purply. Alright, and then with this lighter color, now, this gray is already dry. So I am touching it, making sure it's dry. I'm going to use that same water down gray, and I'm going to paint this all of these circles here because I'm gonna add a darker color on top. But I want this nice light gray. Now I'm adding just enough of that light gray that I can still see the lines underneath. If it gone too dark, I will lift up some of that gray because I want to stain the paper, so it's not bright white, but I still need to be able to see these two circles underneath. Right now with this gray, this paints gray that we still have on our plate, I'm going to remix it because some of my colors I notice started to settle. This was the gray that I used for the back of my Baltimore Oriole. And so I'm going to actually use this to paint my branch in the background, and I'm going to add a little bit more color to it. So I'm going to see what this gray looks like with just a little hint of orange. It's going to kind of make more of a brown, a brownish orange. So I'm adding one or two brushfls to this black. And I can always drop in a little bit more. Now, from here, remember that our light source is up to the right. And so my bottom side of my branch is where I'm going to paint my first line of color. And it's going to be a continual line of color. I don't need to bring it all the way up. And now on this right side, I'm going to try to leave some of the paper to shine through. And so I'm going to add some lines that are continuing to they're in the same direction as this branch. But I'm just gonna leave some of the white of the paper to shine through, and that's going to leave me a really nice gradual dark to light. Now, before this section dries, I can take a little bit of purple, and maybe I can drop in a little bit of purple on this bottom side to darken it up. I can add a little bit of that pains gray directly from the plate if I want to add a little bit of darker on the bottom. And then adversely, I can always add a little bit more of that lighter brown by adding a little bit of orange along the top. So you can just kind of play around with your colors. We still don't want to we still want to try to keep some of those whites open to the papers. I'm only dropping in a little color here and there. If you don't like how that color looks, you don't have to paint it those colors. You can just paint it one solid color. Mm. That's That's that's That's That's that's Black, we're going to add a few extra layers to our orange. So we'll need to clean off a section of our plate because we do want that orange to be really nice and bright and vibrant. If your water is really dark and dirty, you can get a new cup of water. However, it is a little deceiving. A lot of times your waters still clean enough to use. So we'll grab a new section of water on our plate. We're wanting just over a quarter's worth of water. And now to that water, we're going to start with some orange. Now, your orange hopefully is nice and clean. However, if it's not clean, you might want to just add some water on top. Take away some brush fuls of water and clean your brush if that orange was dirtied up by your green at all. And so I'm going to take some clean orange, add it to my water. That was about three brushfuls of orange. Clean my brush, and I'm going to do the same thing to the red. So I'm gonna find a section of my red that I can kind of clean off. I don't want any purple on top of that red, so I'm gonna clean my brush, re wet that section, make sure that I take all that purple off, clean the brush. I really want to have that nice clean red. And then I'll take that clean red and I'll add it to my orange. I'm trying to make, like, a dark orange. We'll check the opacity of this dark orange using a new section on our paper. So this is looking great. I don't want my orange to be as dark as directly from my paper. That's gonna be a little bit too opaque. When personally, when I'm doing feathers or any sort of fur technique on top of a layer of color, I do like to keep my second and third layers nice and transparent. I can always drop in more color while it's wet, but having too opaque of a second layer might make that layer look like it's floating on top instead of connected to. So it might make it look a little bit too different. And we want all of these layers to connect nicely. And so having transparent layers really helps with that. 9. Baltimore Oriole Part 6: So when I take a look at my reference photo, I do notice that the underside of the belly here is where the darkest of these patches are, as well as on the breast here. So I'm going to start by adding a few of these wet-on-dry. We're painting on dry paper. And I'll start by adding kind of a blob of color. It's kind of like an oval of color. And from that oval of color is where I can if there's too much, I can dab off some of that liquid. But from that blob of color, just like I did with the gray here, I can pull some strands coming down the same way that I kind of pushed some up here. I do want these ones on the belly here to be using the same curve of the belly. I'm not going to have any strands push upward. I want these to all come the same way because our feathers are laying flat underneath. I'm going to kind of stick towards this underside of the belly, and I'm gonna try my best. Because I have this transparent color, I don't really need to blend this to my background. So you notice I'm not drying my brush. I'm not blending these out at all. I'm leaving these hard edges, and I know that can be challenging and it can be tricky. But leaving these hard edges is going to create that feathered look. If we dry our brush and we blend all these nice edges out, that's where it's going to look too blended, and we won't be able to see any of those nice details. Now that I have kind of a line along the belly, I'm going to take a jump here because there's a little bit of fluff kind of on this underside. And there is a little bit of a shadow here underneath. So I'm still doing brushstrokes that are following the curve of the body. I also notice that there are some darker shadows under the wing. And so, same thing. I'm gonna follow kind of the shadow. Underneath this wing, I'm going to add some of this darker orange. And then in this section in between here, I can always do a few kind of single lines just to kind of denote that there are feather like There's, like, a feather area here. So I'm adding these single lines to this area, but I'm also leaving some sections here that don't have any details. Now, while this section under the wing is still wet, I might go in and add a little bit of red just immediately under this section in the wing just because it is a little bit darker. Looks like I got a little too dark, so I'll grab a little bit, lift a little of that away. To Alright, and now there is this section kind of by the triangle that's coming down from the chest. And this little section is also a bit darker on our Baltimore Oriole. So I'm gonna add a little bit of darker color to this triangle. I'm gonna keep it kind of in this same triangular shape, mimicking this triangle here. I might add a few little hairs to kind of mimic feathers along this base. And then this edge, I think is the one edge that I might blend out a little bit. Now, this section here, I can also drop in a little bit more of my red or a little bit more of my orange just to kind of get this chest area a little bit deeper of a red, orange. And then the last little area that I know there's a little bit of shadow is on this bottom side of the tail feathers. So I'm just gonna paint a single line of that orange on the bottom side of this tail feather here. Alright, so if any of these edges are bothering you now that they're starting to dry, instead of blending it out with your paper towel or with your brush, you can always try to blend a little bit. I don't want to completely take away all of them, but maybe I'll just blend out one or two here and there, if it got to be too intense. So just by blending out with a dry brush or my paper towel, I now have some edges that are still hard, and then one edge that's blended. I do kind of like how that looks a little bit better, and maybe I can see about blending out this edge. Some of your edges, if they're too dry, they might not blend out as easily. But like I said, few of these little details, particularly where you see more of the feathers pop out. So on this underside here, I love all of these really hard edges. And so this is where the restraint. You have to really restrain yourself from blending, blending, blending. Now that we have this orange still on our plate, I don't want to get rid of this orange quite yet. I can go back to my oranges, and I can add almost some, like, little dimples onto my oranges. So I'm just adding a few little spot dimples in where the darkest of the shadows is I'm using kind of the edge of my brush, not the full edge of my brush, but I'm using kind of a little bit of the edge, not the point of my brush to add some of these little, like, stipples to the orange. Alright, Al, while we have some of this orange from our shadows, we're also going to use that orange for our orange blossoms. So I'm going to paint the center of my orange blossom here. I'll dry my I'll wash my brush off. And then using that wet brush, I'm actually going to pull I'll kind of wet some of these, um the petals. And I'll just allow some of that orange to get pulled into the flour. Now, I'm not completely covering with water, the whole petal there. So it'll just kind of slowly seep. I'll show you what that looks like on this one. So I've got my orange in the center. Just kind of dotting my orange in the center here. I'll wash my brush. I'll kind of as I wash my brush, I'll just tap it along the side here. And then I'm going to point my wet brush towards the center of my petals, and I'll just come on in and I'll gently touch that orange with my wet brush. And what that'll do is it'll just slightly pull some of that orange into the petals. Now, the key here is we want this to be slightly orange. If you're noticing your orange, your flowers are turning to orange. You can take a little paper towel, clean section of your paper towel around the edge of your flowers, and you can just kind of lift some of that up. But we do want some of that orange to just nicely blend across the flower there. We'll just add a little hint of orange to these little blossoms. I'm just painting a little hint of orange. It's barely anything. It's just one line of orange across one edge of this blossom. And Oh. Already, these first few are already dry. And so I can go back with my orange. Maybe I'll grab a little bit more orange directly from my plate or from my paper. So it's nice and concentrated, and then I can add a little bit darker of an orange in the center there. I'm just kind of dotting this darker orange. And 10. Baltimore Oriole Part 7: So the last step of painting my Baltimore Oriole is going to be my black details. I always like to leave my black details until the very end, just because I want to kind of build up colour, using color instead of using black. So I'm going to just wet my pains gray directly on my paper. And I'm going to grab that pains gray directly from my paper and keep my water handy and my paper towel handy in case I need to lift some of that color up. But the head and the back here are really dark. So this is going to be a little intense. I know it looks very, very dark. I want to remind everybody that we can always add more water onto our project as we're working. But then also once this black dries, we can use a wet brush to lift up some of this black to create highlights. So instead of trying to leave highlights on this head here, I'm going to actually just paint one whole layer of black, and then I'm going to come back after it's dry, and I'm going to lift up some highlights. I might try to lift some highlights well well, it's wet, but if it's not working for me, I know that I can always lift highlights after it dries. So I'm going to start by making sure that that layer of black is nice and dark along the head here. I'm going to keep my brush nice and wet so that I can really grab and paint this black up to the edge of the beak wherever it needs to go. Now, from this here, there's a little almost like nostril in the beak, so I'm going to add that little detail. And then I'm going to use my brush to just pull the slightest little black line here. I'm pulling it from the center of my beak out. If this is too hard for you to paint that fine, fine, fine line like that, I would suggest maybe not doing it with paint, and if you have a black pen at home, maybe you try doing that detail with a black pen. Now, as I come down to my chest here, remember that I already made these little lines that are going to be covering the orange here. I already made those guidelines using my gray. And so I'm going to use those guidelines to paint the black on top. The Baltimore Oriole body is quite, quite, quite dark. I mean, it's the males, at least. The body is really nice and dark. So now I'm going to come to the shoulder here. This little back section of the wing is nice and dark. The top section is where we also have some highlights. So I can try to lift some highlights once I'm done with this whole black section. So once again, I'm going to try my best to come in with my black. And slightly go over those that gray. Now, here, if I leave some of those gray lines that I painted first, if I leave some of those open, and leave those gray and I don't cover those with black, that's okay. All that's gonna do is it's gonna leave a little bit of dimensionality. So I might not pull my black to cover all of those lines. No. If that happens, grab your paper towel, press down as hard as you can. I'm gonna have to lift that up later, but I'm gonna I'm gonna finish with my black, and then I'll show you how I can kind of lift that spot later on. I'm gonna continue around with my black. As we get to the end of our wing here, I actually don't need to keep the end of this wing all that dark. I'm going to add some dark lines, but most of the end of this tail feather or sorry, not tail feather. The end of the wing feather is actually a lighter gray. So I'm adding a line of black along. It's almost like this underside here, under the wing. As kind of a shadow. And then I'm leaving the top of that really nice and gray. I'll do that same thing here with the tail feather. So I have this nice, dark black along the bottom of the tail feather. But then along the top of the tail feather here, it is still this nice gray. So I'm gonna keep that gray on the top of the tail feather. And this black got a little bit. My reference photo, the black isn't quite as thick there. But my brush wasn't able to control it quite that well. That's okay. Right. Now I do notice some darker black lines in between these whites, but, you know, that's I think I'm too hesitant to add some of those black lines. So I'm not gonna add those black lines there. This is where when we're painting watercolors from a picture, we do have to, you know, take a step back and realize that it's a picture and that we can add details where we want, but we can also edit out some details and not add all the details we see. So in the eye here, I'm painting the center pupil of the eye black, and now I'm going to add a little bit of that black to the feet. So there's not a ton of black on the feet, but I'm going to add a little line of black along the lower side of the leg there. I'm gonna dry my brush. Just kind of blend out this black a little bit. Bird feet are really hard to paint. So I'm just adding a few spots of black here and there because it's dark, but they're kind of, you know, dinosauri. And so I'm adding a little bit of shadow, but I'm also not needing these feet to be perfect by any means. There's a little bit of a shadow at the bottom of the beak, so I'm using kind of this water down Gray, add a little shadow. I noticed I didn't really add a shadow on that beak. Alright, and now is where we can we've painted this whole layer of black. It's starting to dry. It's fairly dry. In fact, I'd say it's mostly dry. And so I'm going to show you how to lift up some of that black now that it's dry. So as it stands right now, this black is looking kind of flat, mainly because it's one solid color of black. Now, in my reference photo, it does look fairly flat, as well, because it is so black. But I can always lift where I would see some highlight. And so I'll dry my brush. I'll dab it on my paper towel, just so it's not soaking wet. And just along this back edge of the head, I'm going to wet this again. And do a combination of wetting it and lifting up a little bit of that black just along that back edge of the head. Now, this is what it's looking like, but if this is not something that you like on your painting, you don't have to add this little highlight. I can do the same thing on the back wing. So I've got this little highlight on the back of the head. I'm gonna jump to the back of the wing. I'm still leaving just like I did with oranges, I'm leaving that edge. But I'm just gonna pull a little highlight in the back of that wing. I wet it. I might need to do this a few times to be able to actually see some of that black lifting up. But as you can see, it does give you a little bit more of a three dimensionality here for your birds. And then the same thing. I'm going to do the same thing jumping along this bottom section, too. Now, when I come to the front of the face, I might add just a little highlight, lift up a little highlight of that black kind of on the front of this head because I'm remembering that my light source is coming from this top area. And just by lifting a few of these highlights, it's kind of giving our birds a little bit more shape. Now, the eye here is still a little that little kind of ring around the eye is still a little bit too bright. So I had to wait until it's totally dry, and I'm going to go back and mix a little bit of a gray here with some water. And then I'm going to leave that highlight of the eye, but I'm just going to darken that ring a little bit. I don't want to completely lose the ring in that eye, but I do want to make that ring just a little bit darker. We'll go back to that little section of gray that I accidentally touch that section of orange there. Now, when I'm at my home studio, I often work with a squirt bottle to clean off my plate, and it has clean water in it because my waters a little dirty. Whenever you're trying to clean a section, you'll want to use clean water. So I'm gonna grab some clean water. And I might take a new paper towel for this just because I want to make sure that I'm not using a stained section of paper towel. So with my clean water, I waited until this stain was completely dry, and I'll go back with my water, and I'll just rub back and forth, kind of in a circular motion a little bit until that gray lifts off. And I have my paper towel handy just in case I need to lift again. 11. Indigo Bunting Part 1: Alright, so the very first step for painting our indigo bunting is we want to paint the blue section of our bird using a wet-on-wet technique. Now, if you remember back to your practice sheet, wet-on-wet means that we wet the area first using clean water, and then we can drop in the colors that we would like to use. So I'm gonna wet my paintbrush. I'm going to just activate the colors that I know I want to use. So I'm just going to grab some drops of water, and I'll add a drop or two of water onto my thalo blue. A drop of water onto my green, and then also a drop of water on my purple. All that's going to do is it'll just soften up those colors as we paint the body using just clean water. So I'll wash my brush. Remember that wherever your water is going, your color will also go. So when we look at our indigo bunting, we're going to want to paint clean water along the head. We don't want to paint the beak quite yet. We'll paint around the eye. There is a little section of the eye that is almost like almost like the eyelid. It's that second circle around the edge. We're gonna try our best to keep our blue out of that second circle. Then we'll keep grabbing more more water. Along the wing, we're going to push our water up until you see these kind of the first scalloped edge. So along the edge here, along our scallop. Now, this line that's kind of cutting the wing from the body, we can go over that line. Because I'm printing using waterproof ink, you don't have to worry about the lines on your paper dissolving at all. Now, we'll come down to the belly. We'll make sure to add quite a bit of water onto the belly. Under the wing. As you're painting with water, if you accidentally go over the line at all, don't worry. That's why you have your paper towel handy. Take your paper towel, press down as hard as you can, and then you can re add your water and paint that straight line. When it comes down to the feet, we are going to paint kind of these little shorts that are going to go Bunting is wearing. Then we'll come along the back side, remembering that we're not painting that section of the wing. Now for the tail feathers, we're only going to paint the small strip on the top of the tail feathers. The bottom strip is going to be a brown, an orangy brown, so we don't want to add blue to that. We're only going to want to add wherever our blue color is. Now that we've painted water over everything, the most important step is to go back to where you started and really make sure that that whole section that you started with is really nice and wet. We want an even wetness in the whole body of our indigo bunting. I can always tilt my head to the side. And when I tilt my head to the side and I look onto my paper, I'm gonna notice that the same shine is all over my indigo bunting. If I start to see an area that's really matted, a matt color, not shiny glossy, like here in the tail, that means it's starting to dry already, so I need to rewet it. Alright, now that my whole section that I want to paint is nice and wet, now I can add my color. So I'm going to start with my blue, my halo blue here, and I want to start painting where the blue is the most intense. So the most intense blue is gonna be along the belly here. You notice that the minute that I put my brush down, that blue color is most intense right where I set my brush. I'll bring that blue all the way to the edge. If I just leave it to kind of seep out on its own, it actually won't go all the way to the edge. I do have to help it go all the way to the edge. And then using that blue, I'm going to bring that blue into the body because the inside of the body doesn't actually need to be quite as bright of a blue. So I'm just using whatever blues left on my brush. I can always add more water to the center of the belly because I don't really need it all that dark. I'll bring it down towards the tail. Bring it down at the very tip of the tail. Underneath this section here, I'm making sure to bring that color all the way to the edge. And now I'm going to grab just a little bit more blue for the head. Now, the head is also really nice and dark. So I'm going to put some extra blue on the head. Gonna go around the eye. Make sure that it goes all the way to the edge of the head. Now, this step all we need to drop these colors in while the body is still wet, so you might notice that I'm going a little quickly, and that's because I want to make sure that I get all my colors down before it dries. I'm gonna add some more blue on top of this wing. I'm gonna try my best to kind of keep the wing a little bit lighter so I can always add a little bit water on top of the wing here. Alright, and now that I have blue everywhere, I can go back and I can add a little bit of green. So I'm going to grab some green here. Now, I want my green to be mainly mixed to a teal along the center of the body. So I'm taking just the tip of my brush and grabbing a bit of that green. And then I'm going to blend the green in with the blue to make this really nice light teal color. I'm not blending the blue along the edge here. I'm just blending it along the center. And now, before it dries, now I'm gonna want to look and see if I can bring in any purple where it's the darkest. So I'll grab just a little purple on the tip of my brush, and I might want to add just a little bit of purple along the belly. And when that purple blends with the blue, it's gonna give it this really nice, rich blue color. I don't need to overly blend here. Just adding a little bit of purple, maybe a little bit around the eye here. And now I can take a dry brush and I can lift in any sections where that color got a little too dark. Now, I do know that my watercolors are gonna dry just slightly lighter than what they look like when they're dark. So I don't have to worry too much about taking away color from the darkest of the areas. I just want to maybe lift up some color from the belly here, kind of this underside, and I noticed that the tail is a little bit darker. I'll add a little bit of that dark blue to the tail. And then I want to let it sit and dry completely. Alright, so we're going to start by painting our raspberries. Now, we'll use a similar technique where we'll wet the area first and then drop in our color. But instead of wetting the area with water, we're going to actually paint a first layer of red and then drop in some purples. So I'll grab some water on my plate, and then I'll come over to my colors, and I'll grab some red from my paper and add it to my water. Alright. Now, this red is really nice and bright of a red, and I don't want quite this bright of a red, so I'm going to grab just a little bit of that purple and add some purple to that red. It's just going to calm the red down and make that just a slightly deeper red. So when I check it on a section of my practice sheet, it's looking really nice. Now that I have this base layer, I'm gonna paint the base layer first, and then I can drop in both red and purple wherever I would like on those berries. So I'm going to turn my paper so I don't accidentally set my hand on my indigo bunting. And I'll start by adding a drop of color to the center of my raspberries, and I'll push that water to the edge. Wow, this is still wet. Now I can drop in some red, or I can drop in a little bit of purple. And so these two colors, the red and the purple are gonna mix on my sheet. So the purple obviously is gonna be where you have some shadows. So I might keep the purple just on one edge of my raspberry and remember that I can dry my brush, and I can lift up using a dry brush if that purple got a little too dark anywhere. So we'll do this a second time. I'll grab my water down red, dot it in the center of my berry, and then push to the edge. I want to make sure that the paint goes all the way to the edge of my berries or otherwise I'll have a hard edge. So I want to take the time in the beginning to really make sure that the color is going all the way to the edge. Alright, now I can drop in my colors. I can either drop in more red if I wanted a little bit more vibrant, or I can take just a little tiny bit of purple on the end of my brush. That wasn't enough. A little bit of purple. And then along one edge of my berry, I can drop in a little bit of purple. Remember that if your purple goes where you don't want it to go, you can dry your brush and use a dry brush to kind of help soak up where you don't want that purple to go. Alright, we'll do the rest of the berries the same way. Mm. 12. Indigo Bunting Part 2: Alright, so now we need to let the raspberries dry that first layer of the raspberries. Remember, once they start drying, even if you can see little slivers of where you didn't push the paint all the way to the edge, wait for the whole thing to dry before you add another layer. So while we wait, let's start on painting the leaves. You'll need a new section of your plate. If the red kind of went all over, you can clean your plate off. We'll grab more water in a new section. You'll need about the same amount of water as you did for your berries. So to that water, I'm going to add some green first. So I'll roll my brush around in the green, add it to my water. I'm gonna need to do that two or three times. And now, this green is a little too bright for me. I do want to kind of make this green a little bit more like a sap green, which has a little bit more brown hues to it. So to my green, I'm actually going to add some of my orange. So I'll roll my brush around. I'll grab one brush full of orange and add it to my green. And already, you see that I've got a little bit warmer of a green with that orange there. So testing it on my paper, It's going to look so here's our green directly from the dot. It looks a little bit more like a sap green, which sap green does have more of our brown yellow color to it. So we're going to start by painting a leaf using this green, and then we'll use the same wet-on-wet technique to drop in some of that hooker's green dark directly from the paper. So it's going to be nice and dark. And we'll drop that in where the leaf attaches to the stem. So here's my first layer of green. I need to make sure that I go all the way to the tip. And all the way to the edges. And now, while it's still wet, I don't need to wash my brush. I'm just going to grab some of that deep green directly from my paper, and then I'll dot, dot, dot where the green attaches to the stem. I can either.it or I can use some brush strokes to push I like to push the pigment into the stem and then maybe pull a little bit towards the center where you can see the center stem come off. Now, you can always blend your two colors by cleaning your brush, drying it, and then using a dry brush to just blend where these two colors are mixing. You can also take a dry brush and lighten up the end of your leaf if you want a little bit more of a difference between light and dark. Alright, we'll move on and we'll do the other leaves that same way, remembering that we can twist and turn our paper so our wet paint doesn't get in the way. So we'll paint this first layer of our leaf using that watered down green. And then while it's wet, we don't wash our brush, we just take some of that hooker's green deep directly from our plate or from our paper, excuse me. And then we'll dot wherever that leaf connects to the stem. Then I always like to wash my brush, dry it, and then I'll use that dry brush like a sponge to lift up where I want a little bit of a highlight. And then we'll do the other leaves the same way. Alright, I can also use this water down green to add a little bit of color to my stem. If you can't get a fine enough point for these little tiny sections of the stem, I do suggest tapping your paper towel. That's going to release a little bit of the liquid that's on your brush so that you can get into some of these littler sections. Alright, so while we wait for our colors to dry, I'm noticing that the body of my indigo bunting still is a little wet. I know it looks I may look like it's dry, but there's quite a big bump on the body here, meaning that the paper is still trying to dry. So while I let that continue to dry, I'm going to work on my little blossoms. So for my blossoms, I'll wet some gamboge. That's your yellow color. And I'm gonna paint the yellow color. I'm gonna.it along the center of my flower. I'll do that actually to both of them right away. Then from the center, I'm going to wash my brush, and then I'll use a wet brush. I'll keep this amount of wetness in my brush. I'll point it to the center of my flour, and I'll paint some white on the petals until I get just up close, and I'll grab just a little bit of that yellow to drag into and blend into these petals. So I'm going to rotate my paper. I'm kind of painting with the flat the long edge of my brush. So I'm just kind of going up and down and back and forth like this. Now, the reason I'm doing that is because then I don't have the water going all the way to the edge. I don't need it to go all the way to the edge because these are white flowers. When I wet it, the yellow is really seeking soaking way too far out. So I'm gonna use a dry brush, and I'm just gonna soak up a little bit of those of that yellow on the edge of the petals. I want a little bit of yellow coming out, but I don't want it to be too much. Now, before this dries, I'm gonna do the same thing on the bottom flour. Now, before these two flowers dry, I can always drop in more color in the very center. I can drop in more yellow. I can also drop in some orange, if I want to make that center look a little bit darker of a yellow. And since I did lift up some of the water, that orange and yellow that I just placed down might spread a little bit, but for the most part, it's gonna stay where I put it. But I know that I can always wash and dry my brush and lift if it spreads a little bit more. If you want it a little bit darker in the center, you can always add a little bit of red to the very center of your blossom just to keep it a little darker in the center. 13. Indigo Bunting Part 3: Okay, so I'm noticing that the body is mainly dry, but I do want to give it just a little bit more time to dry. So I'll be looking at the wings, the feet, the beak, and the eye. And we want to start with our gray. So I know we've got a lot of black and dark blues on our wing and around our face. But before I get too dark with watercolors, we always like to start lighter with lighter layers and then build up the intensity of the color through layers. So I am actually going to take away my green here so that I have more room on my plate. I'll keep the red if I can, because I will do an extra layer on the raspberries, and I'll grab some water in that new section of my plate. To the water, I'll add pains gray. I'll roll my brush around a little bit, add it to the water. I'm looking to have a medium to medium light opacity. So what that will look like is I want it just darker, a bit darker than staining the paper, why in this section here, this is about the opacity that I'm wanting. If I take my pains gray directly from my paper, it's going to be way too dark for that first layer. And then if I have too much water and too little of pains gray, I might need to use multiple layers to get the opacity that I want. So I'm kind of going for this medium to medium light. Now that I have that, now I'm going to take a peek at where on my indigo bunting, I will need this gray. I'll start looking at the wing here because this is going to be the most tricky section. I do need the point of my brush to be a little bit tighter of a point, so I'll dab my brush on my paper towel so that I get this really nice fine point. I'll start with at the very tip of my indigo bunting at the very end here. This section of wing that's actually laying underneath the other wings on top, that's going to be gray. So I'll paint this whole section here gray. Notice that I've got these kind of white wings almost sitting on top. Most of this I do want to try to keep white. So I'll make a skip up to the top here where the scallop was. And I'm going to paint a line of this gray along the scallop. Now, this feather on the top here can be gray. Then I'll turn to the scallop. From this line of gray along the scallop here, I can pull some gray down where these lines that were indicated that are indicating feathers are. I'll bring the gray around to where the wing meets the body. And I'll do the same thing. I'll just bring some of that gray down these lines that are already printed on your paper. These feathers here in the middle, I'll try my best to keep them white. But if I accidentally paint on top of it, you'll want to take your paper towel and blot it up as fast as you can. Now I can take a peek at the beak, and the beak here is also going to be a gray, so I'll paint this whole section of the beak gray. Now, as you're painting on the body of your indigo bunting, if at any point, when you touch the blue here, if you see that this gray is starting to push the blue away, stop, dry that gray and then let your paper dry a little bit more. That means that your blue is not dry enough. Alright, so I have this first layer of gray on my beak. Now I want to lift a little highlight. So I'll clean my brush, dry it. And I'm going to actually lift a highlight right where that center line is on the beak there. So I'll use my dry brush. If I lifted too much, I can add a little bit more of that gray on the top and bottom. It's going to be a really, really subtle highlight in the center of the beak here. Alright, if you notice that your paper is dry enough, we are going to start painting the eye. So using that same gray, there is a little bit of a highlight in the Indigo bunting's eye. So that highlight is kind of a moon shaped highlight. I will not paint. I can paint the section that's around the eye so that second ring I can paint. But I'll try my best to keep that highlight open. Alright, next, I'll use this light gray, and I'll add a little bit of shadow to the tail. So I'll grab a little bit of that light gray. I'll add a dot to the tail. I'm gonna dry my brush, and then I'll use a dry brush to just blend this edge here. So the edge where that gray meets the white paper, I'll just kind of soak that up a little bit. I might dot a little bit more at the base. By using a dry brush to blend your color to white, we can then keep this section of the paper nice and light. Alright, now, using the same gray, we'll take a peek at some shadows on the body of our Indigo Bunting. Now, where we see some shadows naturally occurring on birds is under the wing. So this line here that denotes where the wing is, I'll paint a very watery line here, starting from where that wing starts, and I'll paint it all along the blue underneath the wing, all the way basically to the tip. Now that I have this line of shadow, from that shadow, I can pull a few strands that is running at the same direction as the body. I can pull a few strands out. This is just going to help blend that shadow into the body. I can make the shadow a little bit darker by adding some pains gray directly from my paper to my brush. And then while that section is still wet, I'll add a little line of that darker pains gray right up next to the wing. If it gets too dark, remember, you can dry your brush and lift wherever it gets too dark. But as you can see, you're already starting to notice that that wing is looking a little bit more three dimensional coming off the page. Alright, we'll take a Pekis to where else we can add some shadow using this lighter gray. I'll add a little bit of shadow along the top of the wing. You will notice that there's some of these little lines here on the top of the wing. I'm going to add some more shadows on top of those lines, and I'll actually add a few more. Kind of all the way to the end of the wing. And then on the section above the wing here, I'll add just more some dots almost. So these are just a little bit of some of the natural markings on your indigo bunting along the wing. You've got these little lines here are going to represent the start of your wing feathers. And then these dots along the top here is going to also help to represent some of these feathers. Lastly, we'll add a little bit of shadow along the bottom of our indigo bunting. So right here where this leg is coming in front, I'll add a little shadow to just behind that, and then I'll pull that shadow along the bottom of my bird. When I look at this leg, this leg is actually behind. This is the leg that's closest to us. So the leg that's behind, I'll add shadow to that whole leg behind. Alright, now that we've added some shadows around our indigo bunting's body, now we'll add the second layer of color. And adding a second layer of color around the eye, around the chest is going to give us a little bit of details that look like feathers. So I'll take away that gray that we were using for our shadow, and I'll add new water to my plate. Now to that water, I want to mix a teal. So I'll start with my blue. I'll add one brushfl of blue. This blue is pretty concentrated, so you don't actually need all too much of that blue to color your water. And then to that blue, I'll add a little bit of green. Now, you may think that your second layer of color needs to be darker than that first layer. But in reality, with watercolors, our second layer is still going to be watered down. The main difference from our first layer to our second layer is that this second layer will be wet-on-dry. So now I'm painting on top of dry paper. And when I paint on top of dry paper, just like when I painted the shadows, you'll see hard edges. And those hard edges is what's going to give us the impression of feathers. The color itself doesn't have to be much darker. So when I test out this color on my practice sheet, it's about the same opacity as my Indigo Bunting as the first layer. That's about what we want. We don't want it darker than that, or we'll have too much of a contrast between layers. In fact, if I start painting and I'm noticing that it's too dark, I might add a little bit of water. 14. Indigo Bunting Part 4: Alright, so we'll start by adding a second layer around the head because the head is actually quite a bit darker. So I'll add around the eye, I'll paint around the eye first. I'm keeping it really nice and wet. And then from there, I'll paint all the way up to the beak. Now that I'm on this back side of the head, I can pull some of my color down. And now I'm gonna pull this color but then lift it up as soon as I get to this neck area. And when I pull up my brush like this, following along the back first, I'm left with a little bit of brush strokes that can kind of look like feathers. I'm not adding any more liquid. I'm just using whatever liquids on the paper. I'll leave a little bit of this intersection here that it won't come down quite as far, and then I'll move on to the front side, and I will pull some of that down over this chest area. So this section is coming down a little bit further than by the eye. I think I need to actually add. I'm gonna add a little bit more green. I think I want this a little bit more teal. Then blue. Yeah, that's looking a lot better. Alright, and now I'll pull this shadow along the belly. You'll notice that I am lifting my brush up as I'm pulling, and that's going to create a few of these little markings that are going to look like feathers. I'll add a little bit darker to this face here. And then I'll use this teal along the wing here to add. That's looking a little too dark. So if I add a little bit and it's too dark, I can tap my paper towel and then use my dry brush to lift a little here. I'm going to add a little bit of that teal on top of these shadows that I painted earlier. In fact, I think I want this whole wing here to be a little bit darker. So I'll connect some of those shadows here. Now, some of these edges are looking a little dark, and so with my brush, I'll clean my brush. I'll dab it on my paper towel because I don't want a wet brush when I'm blending out edges. And I might just blend out an edge or two along the neck here. Along the backside, I might keep this a hard edge. But some of these edges I just might blend out a little bit so that they don't look quite as dark. You can kind of play around on yours with which edges you keep and which you blend out. Now for adding a little bit of detail along the body, this color that I was using on the head and chest is actually quite dark. So I'll add some water just along the edge here, and I'll grab just a little bit of that teal. I'm just making a lighter shadow color so that it's not so dark on the inside. And from here, I'll add just a little section on the chest. I added a little bit of this teal, the water down teal. And then from that teal, I'm pulling some strokes down, and I'm pulling some strokes up. I might do that in one or two other sections here, especially along the tail. So with that lighter teal, just along this tail area here. I'll make that tail a little bit darker. And then I might add just a few little hash marks in this open section. So I've got hardly any paint on my brush. And I'm creating some hash marks this way, and then some hash marks the opposite direction. It's going to kind of give it a little feathery of a look. I'm gonna grab a scrap sheet of paper so that I can show you what that looks like, what those hash marks look like. I'm going to grab a scrap sheet of paper so I can show you what those hash marks look like in case it's a little too hard for you to see. So using that water down color, I'm going to tilt my paper. I'll start by adding a few diagonal has strokes downward, and then they'll kind of connect at a point, and then I'll add a few hash marks on the other side. They don't have to connect, and some of these hashes can go over each other, but notice how it kind of looks like a feather. Now, you might not do one that's this large with a body that's that small, maybe your hash marks might look. Oops, I did it the opposite direction. Maybe your hash marks might look you might have three or four hash marks instead. We do want it now. I had done that in the wrong direction because if you do it in this direction, the opposite way, your feather is gonna look like it's facing, pointing up instead of pointing down. So our diagonal have to be the point of our feather has to be towards the tail there. So you can practice this as much as you need to just with three or four hash marks on one side, three or four on the other, and just make sure that you're using your really water down teal. We don't want to add two dark hash marks on top of our first layer. Because if we do if they're too dark on top, it's just gonna stand out way too much. This is actually all I'm going to add. I'm going to add just a little bit of those hash marks along the bottom here. I've got my wing that's a little darker, my head that's darker, and the body here that's darker. And that's all I'm going to add because I don't want to overcomplicate this. Alright, while we let that second layer on the body of our bird dry, let's move back to our raspberries, and we can add a second layer to our raspberries. Now, I still have this red from the first layer. I can re wet it. Or if you don't have this red anymore, you can mix, take some more water on your plate, add some more red. And then remember that we did add some purple to that red. Now, I actually want to add a little bit more purple than I did the first time because this second layer, I want it to be more of a shadow on one edge of my berry instead of over the whole entire berry. So this is gonna look more like a reddish purple. When I add it to a new section on my plate on my paper, it looks more like this, so it's not as red. And now, just like with the body of our Indigo Bunting, where the second layer is wet-on-dry and you have hard edges, we want the second layer of our raspberries to also be wet-on-dry with hard edges. So I'm only going to be painting a few of these edges of the berry along the darkest edge. Now remember, I added that purple only along one edge, thinking that maybe there's a light source coming from this side, and so it's highlighting this side of my raspberry and the shadows on the other side. So I'll load my brush up with as much liquid as I can have on it. And I'll start by just adding a few almost, like, circle dots. I might circle around some of these just on one side of my berry. So I'm keeping it really minimal. So I'm just adding that second layer on the right side, painting kind of a line of this color. And then from that line that I paint on the right side, I might take that paint and try to kind of go around some of these individual berries just until I get to about the halfway point. I don't want to do anything on this side. Now, with the same color, since some of these stems that are connecting the berries to the plant are a little bit more brown in color, you can always add a second layer of this purple to your stems, and all that's going to do is it'll just kind of change that color of the green into more of a brownish color. I can also add that brown purple and run like a little stem down the center or a center vein down these leaves. Once again, if you don't like how that looks, you don't have to add that stem. When I use the same color that I used in a different section of my painting. And I use that same color as a second layer, it helps to unify the colors in my painting. So because I used this purple already, this reddish purple in my berries, when I add it to my leaves, it helps to connect my leaves to my berries. 15. Indigo Bunting Part 5: We are now ready for our black details. So instead of mixing a black on my plate, I'll actually add a drop of water to my Payne's gray, maybe a drop or two. And I'll be picking up this Payne's gray directly from my paper and using it like a black. I am keeping my paper towel handy just in case I need to soak up any of that black using a dry brush. And I'll start with my darkest areas. So the darkest areas on my Indigo bunting is definitely going to be the pupil of the eye. So I'll try to once again, I'll try to keep that highlight from getting paint on it. I like to turn my paper upside down, and then it might help a little bit to get that color in where it needs to be. Once again, I am dotting my brush on my paper towel, so I've got a little bit fineer of a point. If you do have a smaller brush at home, you definitely can use the smaller brush with the eye there. I'll grab a little bit more pigment, and then I'm going to start painting I'll grab more of that watered down pigment. And I'll start painting this section of around the beak and eye that are black. So I'll start here on right next to the beak. And I'll bring my black up to where that second ring of the eye is, and I'll paint that black around the eye. I'll paint it around the bottom of the beak. And then from this section at the bottom of the beak, I'll dry my brush, and I'll use whatever's liquid is there, and I'll pull some strokes. Now I'll pull the longest one kind of in between the neck here immediately below the beak. And then I'll pull a few strokes, kind of keeping it in this triangular shape. I might add a single stroke here under the eye. There's just a single stroke here. And then while this is wet, I'll go back to where the center of the beak is. And I'll pull a really fine line from the center of the beak coming out. Now, if this is too hard for you to do, it's just a paintbrush, you might be able to do this with a micron pen. So micron pens are black pens that are waterproof. They are not included in the kit, but I love having these black pens. It's just a really fine tip pen that you can use to add details. You could also use if you don't have one of those, you can use a fine tipped sharpie. You can also use a fine tipped colored pencil. I might add a little bit of this black along the tip top of the beak here, and then a little black and this little nostril. That's all that I'm going to add black to to the head and the beak. Now I can take a peek at my wing. So on my wing, I'll grab a little bit more black. The darkest section of black is just at the base of this wing here. So I'll start by painting this second layer of wing. It's not the wing at the very base. It's kind of this one in between. And from this line, I'll drag that black up I might try my best to kind of go down some of these lines that were printed on your paper. If that's hard for you to do, don't worry. We'll just try our best to bring a very light touch. And then I'll also take some of that black and pull down. Along the bottom here, I am gonna have a little bit more of a shadow with my black. All along the bottom of this wing. From the top of the wing here where it's kind of in almost What would be their armpit? All the way down the wing. I'm using a very light touch on my brush. And then I'll come back in and I'll add just a few little black details in the center. There are some little ma, like backward Cs that I can outline with the black if I can do that with my black, I might also add a little bit extra black here. And then along the back of the wing, where we had these little lines, I might add just a few extra black lines just along the outward most edge. When I move on to the tail, I'll add a black line. I don't have enough water there. I'll add a black line in between where this black and then where the lighter color of the tail is. Very, very fine, fine line. I'm barely touching my paper. And then from here, I can just add a little bit of details to my legs. So I'm going to choose one of the edges of my legs, so I might choose this bottom edge, and I'll add a line down the bottom of the leg. I'll add a little line of black at the bottom edge of all of the feet and all of the toes. Feet are a little difficult to paint with birds. Once I've added this bottom layer, I'm gonna wet my brush, and then I'll use a damp brush to blend out some of those edges, so I'll come to the feet particularly. And I'll just blend some of those edges, so I'm coming up with that wet brush. And I'm just using that wet brush to kind of turn that black into a little bit of a gray on top. Now, where the Indigo Bunting is sitting, you can really use any color there. I think. I think I want to add just a little bit of this purple color almost, but I really want it to be very, very light in color. So I'll add quite a lot of liquid here. I'm gonna use the edge of my brush. So instead of, I might practice this once on a little practice sheet or I can flip my practice sheet over practice on that. I'll use the flat edge of my brush, and I'll kind of hold it as close to my paper as I can so this whole edge is hitting my paper. And then I'll just drag it across my paper. You notice because the texture of the paper, it's going to leave you a little bit of a texture there. I don't want a whole lot of color. I don't want this color all the way to the base. So I'll just add a little bit of color here. I'll dry this off. I'll just kind of lift it a little bit. That's really all I want. I don't want a ton of color only because I don't want to take away from all the pretty things that we just painted. Can even lift up a little bit of that with my paper towel if I don't want it quite that dark. Alright, and then the last little thing that I wanted to add to our indigo bunting is on the bottom of the tail and the feet. So the bottom of the tail and feet do have a little hint of orange. So I'll take some water and a new section on my plate. If you need to clean off a new section, clean it off. I just need a really little bit of water. I don't need a lot. Then I'll come and I'll take some orange. And add it to my water. I don't need that much orange in my water. What we're doing now is called glazing. So I already painted all the shadows, all the colors, everything onto my painting. And glazing is a very, very light, transparent layer that we add on top of sections that we already painted. And that's going to just change the color of that section. But it still allows all the shadows and everything that was underneath it to still shine through. So I'll add just a little bit of that orange along the bottom of the tail. The bottom of this wing that's underneath. I also is just a little hint of orange as well, and the feet have a little hint of orange. So I'll paint this light orange over the feet. Because it's watered down enough, you can see all of the shadows that we painted underneath. Everything is just kind of sticking through and showing through. And then I'll take just a little tiny bit of that yellow, and I'll add it just to the end of my beak here. I'll dry my brush. I just want the end to be just a little hint of that orange, maybe also in where that little nostril is. It also has a little bit of orange. 16. Indigo Bunting Part 6: Alright. Now, the very last little details are you can always lift a little bit of a shadow from the head. Now, we added quite a bit of shadow around the head area, and it got a little dark here. So now that it's dry, it's completely dry. I can clean my brush, and I can use a damp brush. To lift a little highlight on the end of the head. So I'm going to leave the edge completely dark, but I'll come just in from the edge, and I'm going along the same shape of my head. I'm re wetting it, and I'm using my paper towel to lift some of that color away. You may need to do this a few times, so re wet the area a few times and then dry your brush and use a dry brush. But going over that area just a few times, you can already see that it's lifted. Some of that blue away, and that creates a little bit of a highlight. Can also use a damp brush to help with any of your hard edges that got too hard. So this edge here by the face, if that got a little bit too hard and I want to blend that edge, I'll use a damp brush and just lightly go over that edge to just soften it a little bit. Now, all of these little corrections I can only do when my painting is totally dry. If the head here is still wet, it actually will ruin your painting because remember, it'll push the pigment out of the way. All right. And that's our Indigo Bunting. Lastly, I do want to mention that if you weren't able to keep that highlight of the eye clean, you can always use a white gel pen or white gouache paint or white colored pencil to add that highlight in the eye um, if you accidentally painted over it. You can also use these gel pens on top to add little feather details. These are just kind of nice gel pens to use to add extra details. I like to use a UIBal Cigna in my studio. This isn't included in the kit, but it's just something extra in case you do like kind of a more illustrative approach to your paintings. And that's it. Congratulations. 17. Cedar Waxwing Part 1: Alright, so the first step for my Cedar Waxwing painting, we're going to start with a wet-on-wet layer. So remember, from your practice sheet, wet-on-wet is when you wet the paper, the section that you want to work on first, and then you drop the color in. So for this first layer of my Cedar Waxwing, I'm going to wet the whole area wherever I want the oranges or yellows to go. However, I'm also going to wet the area where the white of the tail is and underneath the wing here where it's also darker brown. The reason being is that I don't want my color to stop where the paper is dry, and that's going to create a hard edge. So I want to keep that water going and just keep my color out of that section. It'll make a little bit more sense once we start to water the area. So you can start by wetting your brush, and we're going to wet only the areas, like I said, where we want those colors. You'll notice that I am keeping my paper pretty wet. I'm going to paint up to the edge of the lines. I'm constantly grabbing more water because this is a cold press paper, this paper will stay wetter for a little bit longer. It's also a professional quality watercolor paper. So it is going to hold that water and retain it, keep it wet for a lot longer than a student grade paper would. I'm not going to be all too meticulous in these little fluffy areas because I can always extend my paint a little bit further. I'm only going to extend my water to this bottom area. I've got this whole bottom here up to where the mask on my Cedar Waxwing is. And then the area that I'm going to paint this first layer of color, I'm going to keep this little section open. I noticed that that is white in my reference photo, but I'm going to do this layer of the wing. I can go on top of these lines in the center here. But this little section of the top of the wing here, I'm going to keep open. Now, when I tilt my paper and under the light, I notice that the areas where it's wet is going to stay shiny. I'm going to re wet, add more water. I just really want to make sure that my color is going to be able to run. And if it's dry at all, the colors going to stop there. So I really need to make sure it's nice and wet. I'm also going to wet this section of the head up here. Now, as we're doing this first layer of color, if at any point, you notice that your paper is starting to dry too quickly, you'll want to re wet that area because we do want this first layer to stay really nice and wet. So I'm going to start with my lightest color. So I'm going to grab this gamboge, this yellow. That's going to be my lightest color here. And it's most concentrated under on this underside of the belly here. So that's where I'm going to start with this color. Now I know to the right of this is mostly white. So I'm not going to move my color that way. I'm going to now extend this color, this yellow upwards. And I'm just using whatever color is left on my brush. In fact, I'm going to wash off the rest of that color because up towards the face, it's actually gonna turn into orange. So I've got my most concentrated color here at the bottom. It kind of stops and becomes white. Now, I can dry my brush off and use a dry brush to just kind of blend those colors out. And now before this dries, I'm going to add some orange. Now, you can either use this cadmium orange or you can use the cadmium deep bread and then mix that cadmium deep bread with your yellow color underneath. So here I'm going to add a little bit of that cadmium. If it's too red, you're not liking how red that's looking, you can add a little bit of that orange instead. Now, you might notice that I'm continuously adding a little bit of water back to my section so that it stays nice and wet. Okay, now, before I finish with this, I noticed that this orange is a little bit too bright in my cedar Waxwing, it's a little bit more of a brownish color. So here, where these colors are blending, I'm going to use a dry brush to just kind of blend these colors out. So once again, right here where my colors are a little bit too orangy, I'm going to actually take just a little hint of that purple. I'm going to add just a little bit of purple, maybe a little bit of red. And all this is doing is it's using a little bit of color theory to just kind of tone down that orange a little bit, make it a little bit more of a rusty color. So just a little bit more red on my brush. Now, this whole section is still nice and wet. Maybe a little tiny bit of purple. Like I said, if your section starts to dry a little bit too quickly, you'll want to re add some water. Alright. Now, I know I didn't do a huge section of this wing here. I'm gonna come back with some browns, but I'm gonna let that all dry first. Alright, so to start with my berries, I am going to mix some colour on my plate. So I'm adding some water onto my mixing plate. And I'm going to start by mixing kind of a medium tone color. That's going to be my base color, and then I'm going to drop in some darker tones from that base color. Now, my June berries, my service berries are kind of a mix between this red and purple. So I started with a base of this red, and now I'm adding just a little bit of purple, just to tone down that red a little bit. And now I have this base color. If I practice use a practice section, if I use a practice section here, I notice that my color is not too dark, it's not too light. It's kind of a medium tone. So I'm going to start by painting that medium tone color on a berry. And now, just like we did with our bird with the Cedar Waxwing body, I'm painting one layer of color, and now that it's wet, now I can drop in more color if I want to. So I can use this as the opportunity to drop in a little purple on one edge or a little red on a different edge. This is kind of your opportunity to paint these service berries all slightly different using these different combinations of red and purple. And this is just going to be the first layer of color so if I have two berries that are touching each other, I can still paint them together, and then I'll take my second layer and use the second layer of color to separate them out. But this first layer, we can do two of them at once if we want. Like I said, I can drop in some purples somewhere. Or I can grab a little bit of red and drop in red. Like I said, these service berries are just a combination of this red and purple both together. If, as you start painting, you get one section that's a little bit too dark, or if you get color somewhere that you don't want that color to be, you can dry your brush and use that brush to just kind of soak up that color. Your other option is you can take your paper towel, a clean section on your paper towel and press down on that section as hard as you can. And it's gonna mainly lift up that color. Now, a little additional tip as you're painting some of these smaller berries. I do like to grab as much liquid in my brush as I can, and I kind of add a puddle of that liquid in the center, and then I push that puddle to the edges. That's going to give me a really nice edge. Instead of starting at the edge, I'm going to start in the center and then push to the edge. I find that gives me just a little bit more control with my brush. I can also turn my paper if I need to. And then that way, I can use my hand, keep my hand in this really nice, comfortable position as I'm painting these berries. So I'm not trying to turn my wrist in an awkward position where I don't want it to go. 18. Cedar Waxwing Part 2: I wa, now that we have the berries done on the bottom frond, now I'm gonna do the berries on the top. Same thing. I'm going to use that base layer and then drop in either red or purple. Since this is my first layer of color, I am going to try to keep it kind of in these medium shades. So I'm going to remind myself that I don't want to go as dark as I possibly can. I still want to make sure that I can add a second layer on top of this first layer that I'm painting. Okay, so now that we're done with our berries, we're actually going to move on to our leaves because I'm noticing that the body of my Cedar Waxwing is still a little bit wet. It still needs to dry a little bit. And the first layer of my berries is still a little wet. So let's start working on some of the leaves. Alright, so to paint our leaves, we are going to mix our base colour on our plate, so grab some water on your mixing plate. We're looking to have about a quarter's worth of water. You can always mix more if you run out. And then we'll grab some of our hookers green dark. You might need a few brushfuls to add to the water. When we test our color, we are looking for kind of a medium opacity. So that was looking just a little light, so I'm going to grab a little bit more green from my plate. There, that's looking a little bit better. So I think I'm all ready to go now. So we're going to do a similar technique for our leaves, as we did with our berries, we'll paint each leave individually with green, and then we can drop in some darker color at the tips or at the base using our Pains gray. Now, we can also drop in a highlight, so we can also drop in some yellow, if that's something that you choose. So we'll start with our green color. I'm going to start maybe with one of a leaf towards the edge. So I'm going to paint the whole leaf first using that watered down green. And remember that we want to keep this color wet. We want to keep the leaves wet before we drop in our our pines gray, so I'm going to do one leaf at a time. And I'm going to I'm not going to wash my brush. I'm just going to dip the tip of my brush into that pains gray. And then you can either drop the pains gray at the tip of your leaf or at the base of the leaf. So I'm gonna see what it would look like at the base of the leaf. So I'm brushing, lightly brushing that pains gray along the base of the leaf, maybe also a little bit of the stem. And then I can bring that pains gray either up the center vein or I can bring that pain's gray up on one of the edges. Now, you can also, if you want, you can play around with adding some yellow at the tip. Remember, you have to do this while your color is still while your leaf is still wet. I'm going to wash my brush and grab a little bit of that yellow, and then I can add just a little hint of yellow at the end of my leaf. Now, after seeing it on the paper here, I'm not too sure if I like that. I think I might just stick with just the green instead of the yellow, but it's something that you can play around with. You can also mix a different base color of green if this green is a little bit too bright for you. So we can always add a little bit of red to our green just to dull down the brightness a little bit. It'll make it a little bit more of a brown color to your green. If you want your green just a little bit darker, you can always add a little pains gray to that base coat of green. Alright. So I have that leaf painted, and now I'll grab just a little bit of pains gray and I'll add a little bit of shadow to the base there. You can play around with adding a little shadow to the tip, too. It's completely up to you. This is kind of where you can play around with some of your colors. Like I said, if you had wanted to add just a little hint of that red to your green, do you see how adding a little bit of red just kind of dulls down that color. It makes it almost more of a brownish green. And so you can either dull down your green, you can also add a little bit of yellow to your green if you want to brighten up your green. And we'll continue painting every leaf using this wet-on-wet, where we apply the base color first, and then we drop in our shadows or highlights. Remember that if at any point you have your gray or your shadow color that is spreading too much, you can dry your brush and use your brush just like a sponge to soak up where you don't want that color to go. And then you can always replace that color with your green there. Mm hmm 19. Cedar Waxwing Part 3: Okay, so as we leave our leaves to dry before we paint the stems and before we add our second layer, let's take a peek back at our Cedar Waxwing. We're going to paint the second layer of color in the body of our Cedar Waxwing, and then we'll move on to the gray tones in the wings and in the little mask. So for my second layer, I'm going to use my plate. I am going to paint wet-on-dry. So remember our first layer, we wetted the whole body, and then we added our color. And so now we have these really nice blended edges of color. Our second layer is going to be wet-on-dry where we have a wet brush. We paint on dry paper so that we can get some of these harder edges. Um, this layer is where we're going to add a few brush strokes to mimic some of the feathers. So let's get our color ready. You might need to clean off a section of your plate. We're gonna be mixing an orange color that we can use for the body, and then we'll go back in and we'll add a little extra yellow if we need to. So I'll add some water to my plate. And now I'm going to come over and I'm going to grab my cadmium orange hue. We do want an orange color, but we do also want a little bit of a rusty orange color. So this is a little too bright of an orange. I added about three brushfls of orange to my water. I'm going to add a little bit of red to my color. So I'm trying to make kind of this darker orange. So let's check out that color. I think I'm going to add just a little bit more red to make a little darker orange of a color. I think that's good for now. I can always add an extra layer of color on top if I need to make it darker. So it is still transparent. We don't have as dark of a color. If I take the color straight from that paint dot, it's gonna be a lot darker. And so that's why we're adding our water. Alright, so we're going to start with a little bit of some feather strokes at the neck. So I'm going to fill my brush up. And remember, wherever I touch my brush first, that's where the most liquid from my brush is going to sit. So I'm going to touch my brush in this center of the neck here, and I'm going to add kind of this blab of paint. Now, from this blab of paint, I can pull a few brush strokes. So I have a very light touch. I'm gonna pull some brush strokes down. And it's going to kind of mimic the curve of the body, and I'll kind of pull a little bit over to the edge as well. And now that I have some of these brush pulled down, now I can also push a few brush strokes up. I'm gonna grab a little bit more pigment, go to connect some of that darker patch. So we've got a little darker of a patch here in the head. And a slightly smaller patch here, as well. Now, from this patch, I know that this little patch here, particularly kind of the patch closest to the center of the neck here is going to be a little bit darker in color. So I might add just a little bit of red while it's still wet. And I'm going to try to just keep that red kind of in the patch here in the center. That looks great. Now I'm going to do something similar along the top here of the head. Just go to add a few extra brush strokes. I'm so going to leave the color that's underneath here. So the lighter tone towards the tip here and the lighter tone towards the top. I'm just going to add a few strokes here in the center. And I'm going to look at the belly here. I'm going to do the same thing that I did before where I'm going to add a few brush strokes following mimicking the curve of the body here. And now, down where I'm grabbing where I'm getting into this yellow, I do want to make this a little bit lighter in color, so I'm just going to add water. And adding just some water to the edge to this lowest edge is gonna make sure that it blends out pretty nicely. I'm just going to add a few brush strokes coming down. I'll come back up. Add a few brush strokes coming up. I think that looks pretty good. I'm pretty happy with how that looks here. Now, if you're at home and you're noticing that you don't have that nice graduation of color that's a little darker to a little lighter, maybe you have some hard edges. You can dry your brush, lift up where it's too dark, or you can take your paper towel, and you can blot where it's a little too dark, particularly around the edges. And what that's going to do is it's going to pick up some of the pigment along the edges so that the edges are a little lighter in color. Alright, now, the last thing that we can do is we're gonna be adding a whole no section of color to our wing here. We are going to add a little bit of black on top of this. So for our section of wing, we're just going to paint a full layer of color of this orange on top. Where the wing is connecting to the back here, you noticed I had most of my color concentrated along the base of the wing. And then as my brush was losing the color, I just dragged my brush upward so that I have less color on my brush, and I have this nice graduation of color from dark to light. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to try to keep these little lines here. I'm going to try to keep those white. And now, as I come to the tip here, I'm going to I'm going to um dab my brush on my paper towel to get all the rest of that liquid off. And now maybe I'll wash my brush. It seems like that's not working too well. I'll use then that slightly damp brush to kind of get my color gradiating from that darker color to this lighter color. We are, like I said, going to put some gray on top. So if you don't get this really nice graduation of color, that's okay. As I'm looking at my reference photo, it seems like there's a little bit more orange at the top of this. So I'm going to add a little bit more orange. We can add a few more brush strokes to mimic some feathers on the yellow section of the body. I'm done with my orange, so I can get a new section of water. I don't need a lot of water. I just need a little bit to mimic the feathers on this underbelly. And I'm gonna grab some of my yellow color. If this yellow is a little too bright, I can come over and grab a little bit of that orange just a hint of that orange, just to dull down that orange dull down that yellow just a little bit. And now I'm going to do the same thing that I did up top, where I'm going to put my brush where I want the majority of the liquid. So I'm going to put my brush kind of in this darkest section of yellow. And then the same thing, I'm gonna pull some brush strokes following the strands of the body and pull some down, and then I'm going to pull some up. I can always take the liquid out of my brush to kind of help. I do want to leave some of these edges to be hard edges, so I can see some little hints of what you might see as feathers. Just like up here now that it's drying, these paint these brush strokes here are the ones that are going to mimic your feathers. So we do want to have some of these hard edges here. And then I noticed that there is a little section of yellow on the tail that I had forgotten to paint along with the body, and it is a pretty bright yellow on the tail there. So we'll paint this little tip here, yellow. Alright, the last little thing that I'm going to paint, I noticed I forgot to paint to the tongue there. So I'm just gonna grab a little bit of my red. I'll add just a little bit of that red, maybe a little bit of the orange to kind of dull down that red color. H. 20. Cedar Waxwing Part 4: As we let our second layer of wet-on-dry dry. Let's work on some of these branches, since the branches aren't touching the main body. I'm going to use some of that orange that I had mixed, and I'll add to that orange. I'll grab a little bit more orange. And I'll grab a little bit of yellow. And now yellow and purple mix to make a brown. So I'm going to grab some purple, mix that with my orange and yellow here. And that's gonna give me this brown color. Now, I do want a medium tone to my brown because then I'm gonna drop in a little bit more purple where I want a darker section of my sticks. So this is kind of a medium tone of this brown. I can always add a little bit more red if I want my brown a little bit. Brighter of a brown. You can just kind of play around with the tone of brown that you have. If you want it a little darker, you can always add a little paints gray. And now I'm going to start by painting a section of my branch. I can leave some of the paper shining through. So you notice that I left a little bit of this paper shining through. That would be for the highlight of the branch. And then I'm going to grab a little bit of this purple. And while it is still wet, I'm going to drop in a little bit of purple just along certain sections of this branch. I can dry my brush, lift up where I want to lift up. But we were wanting to just add a little bit of texture. And so by dropping in some of that purple at different sections of my branch here, it's going to help almost look like little knots in the branch. I forgot to leave a little bit of paper shine through. Before it dries, I'm gonna drop in a little bit of that purple. I noticed that this section is drying, so I'm going to add a little bit more brown. And now I can blend it with either a wet brush or a dry brush. If you blend with your dry brush, you're going to take you're gonna soak up some of those colors. If you blend with a wet brush, you're going to mix them a little bit more. So here I'm lifting a little bit of that branch up. Now, this brown is a little bit too orangy for me for doing the tiny sticks here, so I'm gonna add a little bit more purple. I do want the brown to be a little bit darker of a brown. And maybe I'll add a little bit of gray too. Make it a little bit darker. Now, my brush is a size, too, so it's not quite super small enough for these little tiny twigs. And so, a good hack is to take your paint brush. I load it up with pigment. And I'm gonna before I paint, I'm gonna tap it on my paper towel, just to release a little bit of that liquid so that I have a bit of a finer point. And now I can grab I can now that I have a finer point, now I can paint these little branches connecting the berries with my leaves. All right. And while I have this brown, I can always do a second layer on top of the stick if I want to add even more texture. I'm sticking to one side of this branch, and I'm just adding here and there, a little bit of texture. So I'm just dragging my brush and I'm kind of lifting it up and down and pressing it down. And this is wet-on-dry. So I'm leaving all this nice texture behind. Alright. Now that we've given a little time for our bird to dry, now we can go in and start with some of our darker colors. So once again, I'm gonna need a new section on my plate. If your plate has too much on it, you can just take your paper towel, dry off a little section. If you still have some of that brown, I would leave some of that brown on your plate because you might be able to drop it in on the wing. So you'll need same thing about a quarter's worth of water. And this time, we are going to mix some of our paints gray with that water. So our first layer of color. Here I've got my browns mixing here. Alright, so our first layer of color on the face and on the wings is going to be our medium gray. We can always do another layer of black or the darkest of Paine's gray on top. But remember, with watercolors, we do our lightest colors, and then we build gradually darker and darker. So we'll start with this light gray. We'll start with the beak. So I'm going to paint the whole section of this beak here. I am going to bring it up to the eye. But I do want to be careful that there's a few little circles here in the eye. Those I'm going to try to keep white, if possible. And then there is a little band of white along the bottom here of this mask that I'm also going to try to keep white. I'll follow this little mask on the face. And I'm going to just pull up. I got a little too dark here on the top. So I'm gonna lift it up. Now on the bottom section of the beak here, this lower section of the beak, we're going to paint. There's going to be this little triangle of color here that we're going to keep away from our color. We're gonna keep this white. Now, you've already noticed that as this gray starts to dry, it is drying a little bit lighter than what it looks like when it's wet. We'll also do a single layer of gray on the feet. Now, you'll know that your gray is too dark if you can no longer see the lines that are underneath. So which is why we made sure to mix our gray with water first. And you notice how I can see these printed lines underneath. That means that my gray here is not too dark. 21. Cedar Waxwing Part 5: Alright, now, as we look at the wings, this is where it gets a little bit more complicated for our wings. And so, before we start, I do want to show you which sections we're going to try to keep white. So we have a few of these lines along the bottom of the wing. We're going to try to keep those white. We're also going to keep this little triangle here, and then it extends down the wing, we're going to keep that white if we can. But these little feathers here along the center of the wing, we can paint with gray. As I am coming closer to these sections that I want to keep open, I'm going to use my brush and just gently pull as I lift my brush up. And so I'm going to cover a little bit of that wing with this gray. But because I'm lifting my brush up, this whole section is going to stay white. Then there is a section of the wing here that we will paint using a gray I kind of went over the line there. That's okay. As you notice, I'm trying to keep there's this little sliver of paper here that I'm going to try to keep white. And now we'll take a peek at the tail feathers. This whole section of tail feathers is gonna have one coat of gray. As we come down to the tip of the tail feathers, we don't want the gray to cover up the yellow at all. And now we also want just a little bit of we want some of this gray on the wing itself. The darkest gray is going to be towards the base of this wing. So we're going to add the majority of the color to the base of this wing. Up until we hit these white feathers. Now we're going to wash our brush, tap it on your paper towel. The point of my brush is pointing towards the gray, and now I'm going to blend this out. So the tip of my brush is hitting up against the gray. Gonna grab a little bit more water. And because I'm wetting that line there of the water, it's going to blend it out. Now, I do want this gray to continue. Down the wing here. I grab a little water, do the same thing. I grab have this gray kind of come up. I'll wash my brush. And now from here we're gonna try our best to use a damp brush and just blend out the wing there. We can always if it's starting to dry, we're gonna re wet that whole area. Just kind of blend it out. Blending with watercolors like this can be very challenging. So be a little kind to yourself. Now that it's all wet, I'm gonna take some of that pains gray directly from the sheet, and I'm gonna drop in that darkest pains gray along the bottom of the wing here. Now we can always add another layer of color afterwards if we'd like. But for now, I really like this gradiation that I have right here, so I'm going to let it dry because if I continue to work at it, and if I reintroduce water to this section, it might start to create a bloom where the water's gonna push that pigment out of the way. Now, with the rest of this gray that I have here on the plate, I'm going to add a little bit more water so that it's a little bit more transparent. And with this transparent gray, that it's a little bit lighter in color. I'm going to add just a little bit of shadows to the underside of this wing. So here, right where this wing is, there would be a little bit of shadow because that wing is sitting on top. So I'm going to add a little bit of shadow here. And then with my brush is still wet, I'm going to dry my brush off. And then I'm just going to pull a little bit of that shadow down a little section of the tail here. I might wash my brush. I'm gonna make this. Add a little water there to make it a little bit lighter in color. So since it was a little too dark right there, I added a little water so that it was a little lighter. I'm also going to add a little bit of shadow to the end there. I noticed that's too dark, so I'm gonna wash my brush. And then I'm tapping it on my paper towel because I'm working on a really little section here, so I don't need that much water. Okay. All right. Then lastly, I'm just going to add a little shadow here to the underbelly. Now, this section here is still wet, so I'm going to grab just a little bit of that darker pigment. Add a little line of that darker gray. Underneath, I can always dry my brush and soak some of that up if yours dries too quickly, and you can't paint this line of darker gray. You can do that when that lighter section is already dry. We're just kind of adding a little darker of a shadow right there under the wing. You notice how that little shadow really makes the wing pop out. The last little area that I do want to add a little shadow, too, before I make my second layer of my little mask here is I'm going to add a little shadow under that white section of the mask right underneath I, kind of a line under. Okay, now I'm ready for my darkest darks in the mask and the tip of the wings. So the darkest darks, we're gonna use this gray directly from my paper. I'm gonna keep my paper towel handy just in case it gets too dark. The darkest section on the beak, I'm gonna do one solid line in the bottom side of the beak. And then also kind of on the center of the mouth here. That's where that darkest line is going to be in the center on both the top of the beak and the lower beak. And now this triangle area on the inside of the face right along the eye is going to be dark gray. It looks like black. So I'm going to use that gray directly from the paper. And I'll follow the guidelines on my paper. I'm going to go around the eye And then I'm going to go along the base of this mask here on the face. Now, I also have a little bit darker along the neck here. So with whatever's left over on my paint brush, I'm gonna just add a little bit of a dark section here. All right. And now the last little section that I can paint is the center of the eye. Now, remember that we have those three little white dots that we tried to keep away from our gray. So I'm going to add a darker black on the inside here, and I'm just gonna try my best to not cover those three dots with paint. If you accidentally cover those three dots with paint, it's not the end of the world. I actually feel like this dot here, I can cover with a little bit of paint. I feel like that's too much of a highlight in that eye there. So I did cover a little more of that highlight to the left, so I kind of am keeping just one of those little highlights there. If you accidentally cover the whole eye there, there's always options to add a little bit of pen or colored pencil, white pen or white colored pencil when you're done. In my home studio, I like to use these UIBal Cigno pens for highlights of the eyes if I have a hard time keeping that white of the eye, the white of the paper. 22. Cedar Waxwing Part 6: Alright, let's move on then to the darkest blacks in the wings. So the darkest black in the wing here, I'm going to start with my darkest black at this corner here. And then I'm going to grab a little bit of water in the middle section. Pull a little of that water down. So pretty much this whole section here is gonna be nice and dark, especially at the tip and at the base. And now, before I'm done, I want to give a little shape to that. So I'm gonna dry my brush off. And here, just in the center, I'm just going to lift up a little bit of that black from the center of that wing here. So I want the tip here to be dark, and I want this tip to be dark. But lifting a little bit of a highlight from the center there is just going to help with the three dimensionality. Alright. Now when I look at my wing here, if you needed to add a little bit of extra black to any sections of your wing, if it got a little muddled in color, you can always add a little bit of extra black. Wet my brush, grab a little bit more color. And then here these little almost C shaped, backward C shapes I can add some black to these backward C shapes. Now, if you can leave a little bit of dar that lighter gray shining through, so I am painting kind of a C shape with my brush and leaving a little bit of that gray in between is gonna make it look a little bit more like feathers. So all I'm doing here on the edges is I'm using kind of a wet brush to keep these edges really nice and clean. You may notice because the paper is textured. If you don't have enough water on your brush, you don't get very good edges because the texture of the paper shines through. Now, with the same dark gray, I'm going to pull just a few strands from the tip here up. This is a little bit more challenging. If you don't, if you're not able to get very small lines, that's okay. And then the tail feather we'll add a darker line of tail feather along the base here. And then along the top. So we're gonna leave just a little hint of that lighter gray in the center. I don't like how that ended up looking, so I'm going to take a wet brush. And I'm just going to blend the edges now that it's a little dry. The nice thing about this gray is that you can take a wet brush. If you have an edge that's a little too hard of an edge, you can always wet it and then blend that edge using a wet brush once it's dry. Alright, and now we'll take a little bit more of that pains gray. We'll look at the feet. The feet are kind of challenging. So I'm just kind of adding a little bit of shadow to the center of the foot here, and then a little shadow along the top of the foot and along one side of the leg. And then I'm gonna use a wet brush, a damp brush, just kind of blend out some of those edges. This foot bird feet are kind of gnarly looking, and so we're not painting the actual toes or the actual feet there. We're just kind of painting where we see shadows. Now, the last thing that I'm going to do is I might add just a little bit more brown to my wing. And I have this brown from my tree. Now, if you are liking how your wing is looking, you definitely do not need to add this extra layer of brown. But I'm using the edge that long edge of my brush to add just a little bit of brown, almost like a puddle of brown to that wing there. And now I'm gonna use my paper towel. Don't you just kind of pull some up on the edge use I'm gonna dab just a little bit on the edge there. So that this upper edge stays a little clean. If your brown isn't red enough, you can always add a little bit of your red color. And now, if any of your sections, say, for example, if this here where your wing meets the body, if that's looking a little bit too hard of an edge, you can take your wet brush, dab it on your paper towel. And then just go on with some circular motions there. And all you're doing is you're softening the edge just a little bit by re wetting that color there. And so when you take a peek at it, what happens is that that edge isn't as hard of an edge. It kind of just softens things up just a little bit, almost makes it look like it's coming out of the connecting to the body, just a little bit nicer. 23. Cedar Waxwing Part 7: Once again to all of these berries, I am leaving some of that under layer to shine through. So some of these, I'm only adding that little C shape two, and others, I'm leaving a little highlight. And then for this berry in the center, maybe I just add a few darker dots of color in that very center. Move on. Some of these berries that are in the background, I can paint the whole thing and just leave a little highlight. And for others, I might just do a little C shape. And now I'll turn this upside down. I'll do the same exact thing to the berries up top. Now, if you had wanted to connect the berries with the leaves a little bit more, you can always use this same color that you mix for the berries, and you can always add a little vein down the center or down the sides using this purple. So all that's going to do is it's just going to tie in that purple color to your leaves as well. This is obviously just an optional step. You can even add some of that color to your stems. I'm keeping my brush very light here. So I'm barely pushing my brush on the paper. And you are done painting your Cedar Waxwing and service berries. 24. Follow me on Socials!: For watching. If you enjoyed this ertorial, please follow me on social media. Check out my website, and make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.